Got your response; crying is good, if you end up crying. I know many people who left the local church, and in their visiting around to other churches they just sat in the back row and repeatedly cried week after week. The LC does a real number on people. I'm sure you've got a lot inside, that you maybe even didn't know about, that hasn't been acknowledged.
As a heads up on this post, a little further down I'm going to refer to a few verses and talk about God some, but what I'm trying to do there is show you that the local church is an aberrant and abusive group, even according to the Bible. So I hope you don't feel like you're being preached at.....there were just some points I wanted to make that I couldn't make that fully unless I referenced what some verses had to say.
I also understand the difficulty making friends. How can you make friends when the thing that dominates your life - the church life - is totally foreign to them? How can you make friends when the things that dominate THEIR lives - school clubs, healthy human pursuits, being interested in things, hanging out together - have been passed off to you as dangerous threats you need to be on guard against? It makes connecting with people very difficult. I still feel bad to this day remembering all the great classmates of mine in high school who made genuine efforts to reach out and connect with me and I was so closed toward them in return....only because the LC made me think they were threats to be avoided. Grrrrrr.
You also mentioned THE word in your post: fear.
That's one of the things that makes the local churches an abusive church. Fear is the juice that powers so many things there. Fear of leaving. Fear of not being an overcomer. Fear of appearing too worldly if you, I don't know, go watch a baseball game or something. Fear of not being absolute for the ministry. Fear of not living "pure Christ". Fear of doubting. Fear of questioning. Fear of disagreeing, of speaking up, of being honest, of so many things.
But guess what? Fear is of the devil. Fear is not of God.
It's not normal for fear to permeate a church this way. I'm not going to preach the gospel to you, but I've got to mention a few verses just to show you that this is not what is supposed to be in a Christian setting:
2 Timothy 1:7
For God has
not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind.
Isaiah 43:1
But now, this is what the Lord says…Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have summoned you by name; you are mine.
1 John 4:18
There is no fear in love. But
perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.
We are told repeatedly in the Bible not to fear. If there is fear in a church (aside from a healthy fear or awe grounded in the understanding of how powerful, majestic, and holy God is) then it's not of God. Plain and simple. I'll give you one more verse and will stop giving you scripture lest it starts to feel too gospel-preachy.
Galatians 5:1
It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.
Another way of saying "It is for freedom that Christ has set us free" is to say "Christ set you free SO YOU WOULD BE FREE." When a verse says something twice like that, that's when we sit up and listen. But what the local church does is precisely what is in the rest of that verse - it burdens its members again by a yoke of slavery. In the context of those verses, the yoke of slavery is extra things we "have" to do for right-standing with God. In the LC that could be: make every meeting, prophesy with just the right tone, deny yourself and avoid all music, run away from other Christians, not celebrate holidays, don't have friends, etc... But all those things are a yoke of slavery weighing us down, and none of them are laid down by God as required for right-standing with Him.
ISeeCrazyPeople, just like all church kids, me included, you grew up with a yoke around your neck that shouldn't have been there. You were a young kid that had thick, heavy chains and burdens and unnecessary rules wrapped around your hands and feet and piled on your shoulders. And it's not your fault. And it's horrible that you, and so many others, have gone through that.
So in light of all that it actually makes perfect sense that you would doubt whether you were a Christian or not, because your Christian experience hasn't been a real Christian experience! You were not allowed to experience the freedom that the Bible says Christ died to give you. Instead, you were enslaved by the sophisticated and polished chains of the ministry in the local churches, and probably went years thinking the "problem" was you.
It wasn't you. You were born into an abusive church.
I've recommended a few books to other posters here, and I'll recommend them to you too. You may get some gospel presented to you in those books, but my intention in telling you about them at the moment is more for you to begin to get a grasp of what was going on as you grew up. In other words, the LC uses God's name in order to control people in ways He doesn't want people controlled. (Psst, God hates that). The local church is not the only aberrant group out there like this. There are common threads among abusive groups, and once someone starts to identify some of those things, a whole lot more of your life starts to make sense. (And hopefully you'll realize that God has been sorely misrepresented to you in the local church.)
Sorely.
So the books are:
The Subtle Power of Spiritual Abuse by Johnsen and VanVonderen
Healing Spiritual Abuse by Ken Blue
If you don't have time to sit down and read books while you take care of your baby and toddler, the two authors of the first book did a two-part interview, and that's something you could listen to while you multi-task other things!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGL_Wl7BAfE (Part 1)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MelXy5Gj7Jc (Part 2)
My intention here is not to sneakily push the gospel; it's just to make sure the BAD gospel you heard is crushed once and for all, and then at least you will know the real gospel. As long as you are looking for the truth, I'm confident you'll find the truth. And if you are on a truth quest, you have to hear the real gospel somewhere at least once in your search for the truth, or else it's not a full search!
I'm thrilled to hear that your daughter is growing up so differently from you. You've broken the pattern and prevented it from continuing in your family - that's fantastic. Since you mentioned your worry about her growing up without clear beliefs in God, I would say once again that Christian apologetics helped me the most - going through reasons why it actually makes sense that God created all this, and that the evidence POINTS to a creator God, rather than some random illogical chance accident. What I like the best about apologetics is that its based on logic and reason and evidence, and so I didn't feel like I was turning the lights off in my brain to arrive at the conclusion that there is a God. It's not "the Bible says it so that's it".....they actually wrestle with the hard questions and then it's up to you to decide and discern the strength of their arguments. It gives you good material to grapple with, while the search remains your own. To me, it would be a great component of your truth quest. If you're interested in a few recommendations, I can post some YouTube links, but I'll refrain for now so I don't come across too pushy.
Many people leave the LC and need counseling/therapy. If so, that's not a sign of weakness, but probably a critical part of healing and moving forward. It is hard, however, to find a good counselor who understands abusive churches and the havoc it wreaks on a person.
Anyway, like you, I don't have a ton of time. I tried to say as much as possible today because during the week my schedule is too tight to sit down and write much.
Hope some of this helped.
Trapped